AMD Unveils Trinity-Based Embedded APUs

The company on May 21 announced the
Embedded R-Series accelerated processing units (APUs), based on the Trinity
chips introduced earlier this month. The new Trinity APUs, which offer
integrated x86 CPUs and discrete-level graphics capabilities, are the second
generation of the APU push that AMD first introduced in January 2011.

Up to eight APUs will be offered in
the Embedded R-Series lineup, with the chips offering as many as four chip
cores and 384 graphics cores. The chip cores will be based on AMDs latest
Piledriver core architecture.

The APUs also will carry AMDs
Radeon HD 7000 Series graphics chips, which support DirectX 11 for improved
multimedia capabilities. Some versions of the chip come with PCI Express Gen 2
support.

"AMD pioneered the embedded APU
to offer our customers a high-performance, power-efficient, small-form-factor
embedded processor," Buddy Broeker, director of AMDs Embedded Solutions
unit, said in a statement. "By leveraging its seamlessly integrated
heterogeneous system architecture, developers can tap into a high-performance
and efficient parallel-processing engine to accelerate their graphics- and
compute-intensive applications, all while using industry-standard libraries
such as OpenCL and DirectCompute."

AMD officials have outlined a host
of areas that can leverage the new embedded chips, from smart cameras and
medical systems, to video conferencing, digital signage and point-of-sale
machines.

In a May 21 post on AMDs blog site, Cameron Swen,
manager of embedded marketing at AMD, said the new Series-R chips help system
designers solve the issues of power consumption when trying to ramp up
performance.

New processing solutions based on
heterogeneous architectures are emerging that enable low-power designers to
significantly increase their system performance without adding significant cost
or power to the system, Swen wrote. Heterogeneous processing itself isnt
new, but what makes these solutions different are the open and royalty-free
programming standards for general-purpose computations on heterogeneous systems
that are developing around them, such as OpenCL. Using standards like OpenCL
helps programmers preserve their expensive source-code investment and easily target
and port code between multi-core CPUs, GPUs and new APUs, which combine both
x86 processing cores and graphics-processing units on a single die.

AMD last year launched the Embedded G-Series platform, which offers power
envelopes of 5.5 to 18 watts, addresses the needs of very low-power
applications, he said. In comparison, the new Embedded R-Series consume 17 to
35 watts, a good complement to the G-Series, Swen wrote.

So now there are more options
available to help you find that ideal balance between performance and power
consumption, he wrote.

AMD announced that a number of
system makersincluding Advantech-Innocore, Axiomtek, Congatec, iBase, Quixant
and iBasehave said they will use the new R-Series in their systems.

AMD officials are aggressively
ramping up their second-generation APUs, having unveiled on May 15 the new Trinity A-Series chips aimed at notebooks,
ultrathin laptops and desktops.